Mutton - Collops
INGREDIENTS for small dish. -A few slices of a cold leg or loin of mutton, salt and pepper to taste, 1 blade of pounded mace, 1 small bunch of savoury herbs minced very fine, 2 or 3 shalots, 2 or 3 oz. of butter, 1 dessertspoonful of flour, 1/2 pint of gravy, 1 tablespoonful of lemon-juice. AVERAGE COST, exclusive of the meat, 6d.
Cut some very thin slices from a leg or the chump end of a loin of mutton; sprinkle them with pepper, salt, pounded mace, minced savoury herbs and minced shalot; fry them in butter, stir in a dessertspoonful of flour, add the gravy and lemon-juice, simmer very gently about 5 or 7 minutes, and serve immediately.
TIME.-5 to 7 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A quick reheat dish for leftover roast mutton, and the whole point is speed: the meat is already cooked, so the pan work is about building a sauce around it rather than cooking the slices through.
- The hinge: cut thin, cook brieflyThe slices must be shaved thin from cold meat and given only the 5 to 7 minutes stated. Longer simmering turns already-roasted mutton dry and stringy — the timing here is not a suggestion but the only thing keeping the dish edible.
- Half a pint of gravyAn imperial half pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. Beeton means proper meat gravy or stock from the roast, not a thickened commercial sauce; unsalted lamb or beef stock is the nearest substitute.
- A blade of maceMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg, sold whole as "blades" or ground. One blade pounded is roughly ⅛ to ¼ teaspoon of ground mace — assertive, warm and faintly bitter, so err low.
- ShalotsBeeton's spelling of shallots. Two or three of the small, twin-lobed sort come to roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons finely minced.
- Savoury herbsA Victorian bunch typically ran to parsley and thyme with a little marjoram, sometimes with a scrap of savory itself. A tablespoon of the mixture, minced very fine, suits this quantity.
- DessertspoonfulBetween a teaspoon and a tablespoon: about 2 teaspoons. That is enough flour to lightly bind 10 fl oz of gravy, not to make a thick sauce.
- Mutton versus lambTrue mutton — sheep over two years — is scarce outside specialist butchers. Leftover roast leg or loin of lamb behaves the same way here, though the flavour is milder and you may want the full tablespoon of lemon juice to cut it.
- YieldThe heading 'for small dish' suggests a supper or luncheon dish for perhaps two to three; the recipe names no accompaniment.
Collops is an old word for slices of meat cooked quickly in a pan — the same root that gives Scotland its minced collops and gives English the "Collop Monday" that preceded Shrove Tuesday, when households ate up their meat before Lent. Beeton's book is full of dishes like this because a Victorian middle-class kitchen roasted large joints and then faced the problem of what to do with them for the next three days; whole sections of the Book of Household Management are devoted to "cold meat cookery", of which this is a characteristic example. The seasoning here — mace, shallot, a bunch of herbs, a squeeze of lemon — is the standard English rescue kit for reheated meat, meant to lift flavours that have flattened overnight. Mutton, far more commonly eaten than lamb in nineteenth-century Britain, was strong enough to take all of it.